If you ever any doubts about Samsung and Apple’s leadership in smartphone sales so far this year, let them end now. According to a new report of out Counterpoint Technology Market Research, the two companies are still leading the pack when it comes to mobile phone sales, with Samsung making three of the top five best selling phones on the list.

Counterpoint says the iPhone 5s took the top selling spot for smartphones through the month of May, but the Samsung Galaxy S5 came in second, the Galaxy S 4 third and the Galaxy Note 3 fourth. The iPhone 5c rounds out the top five, with the iPhone 4s following along with the Xiaomi MI, Samsung Galaxy S4 mini, Xiaomi Hongmi Redrice and finally Samsung Galaxy Grand 2. The list, which spans some 35 countries, shows Samsung with a total of five out of the top ten smartphones – an impressive show of dominance to say the least.

The rest of a top 20 list would be more diverse, with Sony, LG and Motorola all snagging a spot, but the top ten is controlled by just three companies. At this rate it’s starting to look like the only phones that can disrupt the iPhone 5s, Galaxy S5, Note 3 and Xiaomi MI will be the iPhone 6, Galaxy S6, Note 4 and MI2. It’s not hard to see why the iPhone still gets special treatment, Hugo Barra left Google for Xiaomi and Google wants to be best friends with Samsung.

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That’s what happens when you have the biggest advertising budget of any company in the world. Just sad that so many have chosen to put up with samsungs shit user experience and build quality and a company like HTC is suffering. Nice to see Xiaomi up there though.

Marketing alone doesn’t sell phones. There has to be something compelling to part people with their money. And as other research has shown, most of the business Samsung gets is repeat business just like Apple. Most other manufacturers are lucky to get a customer to buy their product a second time. Is that about marketing too?

Not really, people buy all sorts of junk for all sorts of reasons, many from just brand cachet alone. Samsung don’t make terrible products they just don’t make the best products on the market, they make up for that with astronomical advertising budgets and selling a lot to people who may not be well informed or afraid or suspicious/cautious of trying other brands. With profits down 25% I personally think they have peaked and people are starting to see there are better products on the market.

I am curious how many samsung phones you’ve owned. I’ve owned 6. Yes, they have their quality issues but then so do every other brand. A day or so ago, I read a rant here about HTC from an HTC enthusiast. I know several who own LG and they are not 100% satisfied. I’ve seen iPhone loyalists leaving that brand for Samsung products. Nothing is perfect and expecting perfection is unrealistic. But, how many Samsung products have you owned?

I owned 2, left the brand behind though a long time ago but obviously used the whole galaxy range phones the s1 to the s5 extensively through friends.

The thing is with samsung it’s not just the plasticky build quality or bland hardware design. Although saying that I just got a one plus one and i can tell you right now the build on this make the galaxy s5 look and feel like an absolute joke, we are talking about a completely different league. The one plus feels just ultra premium in comparison.

But besides build it’s the whole package samsung offer and the brand ideiology. From phones shipping with extensive bloatware, to half cooked fingerprint scanners, gimmicky half cooked unnecessary features to average bland UX design and iconography, poorly optimized laggy software. Half cooked smart watches with beta firmware and horrendous battery life. Flooding the market with hundreds of poor performing overpriced low end models. It’s no wonder they are getting eaten alive in china. Companies like xiaomi just delivering better software and hardware at cheaper prices.

Everything they do just lacks a certain attention to detail, and quality that you can now find with other brands. They need to stop spending so damn much on advertising, chop their product line right down and focus on R&D and making much smaller product lines that perform better. The whole look of the galaxy line is so stale its unreal.

What we are starting to see is the new wave of chinese manufacturers like oppo, one plus, xiaomi, Meizu eating into their profits more and more as they expand globally simply because they are offering better, cheaper and more interesting products.

I’m no apple fan, but in my opinion Apples strategy of waiting, sizing up the market, taking their time and producing solid, well built, strong performing products at launch is something samsung really need to learn.

I am not biased by brand much, more by features such as:
Display
Headset audio volume and quality
Headphone audio quality
Processor speed
Memory (RAM)
Storage memory
Memory expansion
Battery life
Replaceable battery
Radio performance- LTE, WiFi, Bluetooth etc.
Durability
Reputation for low rate of failure
Whether or not it has a locked bootloader
Size of developer community
Repairablity

Those are what’s important to me. The company that aces the most of those features gets my business. So far it’s Samsung, but the LG G3 also looks good.
Currently using a GS4 on VZW running a Google Play custom ROM.
Next phone likely to be a Note 4 at this point.

It’s funny you should say that… From my experience… Samsung’s devices are solidly built… I ordered an HTC One M8 for someone… and the finish on the phone is terrible… too slippery… Had to order a case because the lady I got that for didn’t want to use the phone without one. There was an article about how the case on that phone being too smooth…

Advertising isn’t what put Apple & Samsung on top and is keeping them there. It is building a quality product and giving owners what they want in a smartphone. A company doesn’t sell hundreds of millions of phone on advertising hype alone.

Go Samsung! Ive had 3 Galaxy s class phones in a row and marketing had nothing to do with it. They make great phones. Thats all. Ive had other brands but Samsung just rocks. Htc phones seem weird. LG is pretty good too(my second favorite).

okay im hearing alot of samsung marketing yes I know they are spending billions of dollars on it but I never see a galaxy tv ad , youtube ad nearly as much as I see on apples iphone however I have been seeing LOTS of ad banners on the streets everywhere I go! I got a galaxy s5 cos I like the size , screen , battery and android is pretty awesome and I do like the design It makes sense to me :)

I play with many of the different models because I sell them for all carriers. As said above no system will be perfect. Why? Because no two people are alike in their wants and needs. The so called finished or premium look that some call for come with a price… And limitations.. Guess what Samsung caught on to that when they tried it out for a time in 2010 with the Nexus S. It did not go well for this line (they tried the no expandable media rout). HTCs are good phones but most focus on its sophisticated looks and from most of the reviews I read (that is what a lot of naysayers focus on). No longer walks on water like it used to. They drank the Apple kool-ade (sealed battery no expandable media). Some say with the advent of so much free cloud storage it is not needed, but guess what, lose connectivity or your password and you lose access to your stuff. My friends have had wonderful experiences with the G2 (watching it work is a good experience). True challenger to Samsung processing speeds. As for Apples the last iteration of the phone came with the simplest and most precise statement. It is a phone for the masses. It is simple and because of apples restrictions on UI modifications hard to damage it. But I have watched these same restrictions that help the phone user friendly make it an utter nightmare. Random deletion of files, incompatability with other bluetooth devise so as not to allow simple contact information transfers. The best statement about how fast an apple runs had this small caviat. They had fewer programs are running. I had to laugh at that…. the average “good” android runs multiple apps with similar marks. In my job I have to see positives and negatives of each phone which entails a lot of reading and trials whenever and wherever the opportunity arises. No one phone can be the greatest unless you look at it from a pure number of sales versus returns for each system. Then compare their individual variances

That’s what happens when you have the biggest advertising budget of any company in the world. Just sad that so many have chosen to put up with samsungs shit user experience and build quality and a company like HTC is suffering. Nice to see Xiaomi up there though.

Marketing alone doesn’t sell phones. There has to be something compelling to part people with their money. And as other research has shown, most of the business Samsung gets is repeat business just like Apple. Most other manufacturers are lucky to get a customer to buy their product a second time. Is that about marketing too?

Not really, people buy all sorts of junk for all sorts of reasons, many from just brand cachet alone. Samsung don’t make terrible products they just don’t make the best products on the market, they make up for that with astronomical advertising budgets and selling a lot to people who may not be well informed or afraid or suspicious/cautious of trying other brands. With profits down 25% I personally think they have peaked and people are starting to see there are better products on the market.

I am curious how many samsung phones you’ve owned. I’ve owned 6. Yes, they have their quality issues but then so do every other brand. A day or so ago, I read a rant here about HTC from an HTC enthusiast. I know several who own LG and they are not 100% satisfied. I’ve seen iPhone loyalists leaving that brand for Samsung products. Nothing is perfect and expecting perfection is unrealistic. But, how many Samsung products have you owned?

I owned 2, left the brand behind though a long time ago but obviously used the whole galaxy range phones the s1 to the s5 extensively through friends.

The thing is with samsung it’s not just the plasticky build quality or bland hardware design. Although saying that I just got a one plus one and i can tell you right now the build on this make the galaxy s5 look and feel like an absolute joke, we are talking about a completely different league. The one plus feels just ultra premium in comparison.

But besides build it’s the whole package samsung offer and the brand ideiology. From phones shipping with extensive bloatware, to half cooked fingerprint scanners, gimmicky half cooked unnecessary features to average bland UX design and iconography, poorly optimized laggy software. Half cooked smart watches with beta firmware and horrendous battery life. Flooding the market with hundreds of poor performing overpriced low end models. It’s no wonder they are getting eaten alive in china. Companies like xiaomi just delivering better software and hardware at cheaper prices.

Everything they do just lacks a certain attention to detail, and quality that you can now find with other brands. They need to stop spending so damn much on advertising, chop their product line right down and focus on R&D and making much smaller product lines that perform better. The whole look of the galaxy line is so stale its unreal.

What we are starting to see is the new wave of chinese manufacturers like oppo, one plus, xiaomi, Meizu eating into their profits more and more as they expand globally simply because they are offering better, cheaper and more interesting products.

I’m no apple fan, but in my opinion Apples strategy of waiting, sizing up the market, taking their time and producing solid, well built, strong performing products at launch is something samsung really need to learn.

I am not biased by brand much, more by features such as:
Display
Headset audio volume and quality
Headphone audio quality
Processor speed
Memory (RAM)
Storage memory
Memory expansion
Battery life
Replaceable battery
Radio performance- LTE, WiFi, Bluetooth etc.
Durability
Reputation for low rate of failure
Whether or not it has a locked bootloader
Size of developer community
Repairablity

Those are what’s important to me. The company that aces the most of those features gets my business. So far it’s Samsung, but the LG G3 also looks good.
Currently using a GS4 on VZW running a Google Play custom ROM.
Next phone likely to be a Note 4 at this point.

It’s funny you should say that… From my experience… Samsung’s devices are solidly built… I ordered an HTC One M8 for someone… and the finish on the phone is terrible… too slippery… Had to order a case because the lady I got that for didn’t want to use the phone without one. There was an article about how the case on that phone being too smooth…

Advertising isn’t what put Apple & Samsung on top and is keeping them there. It is building a quality product and giving owners what they want in a smartphone. A company doesn’t sell hundreds of millions of phone on advertising hype alone.

Go Samsung! Ive had 3 Galaxy s class phones in a row and marketing had nothing to do with it. They make great phones. Thats all. Ive had other brands but Samsung just rocks. Htc phones seem weird. LG is pretty good too(my second favorite).

okay im hearing alot of samsung marketing yes I know they are spending billions of dollars on it but I never see a galaxy tv ad , youtube ad nearly as much as I see on apples iphone however I have been seeing LOTS of ad banners on the streets everywhere I go! I got a galaxy s5 cos I like the size , screen , battery and android is pretty awesome and I do like the design It makes sense to me :)

I play with many of the different models because I sell them for all carriers. As said above no system will be perfect. Why? Because no two people are alike in their wants and needs. The so called finished or premium look that some call for come with a price… And limitations.. Guess what Samsung caught on to that when they tried it out for a time in 2010 with the Nexus S. It did not go well for this line (they tried the no expandable media rout). HTCs are good phones but most focus on its sophisticated looks and from most of the reviews I read (that is what a lot of naysayers focus on). No longer walks on water like it used to. They drank the Apple kool-ade (sealed battery no expandable media). Some say with the advent of so much free cloud storage it is not needed, but guess what, lose connectivity or your password and you lose access to your stuff. My friends have had wonderful experiences with the G2 (watching it work is a good experience). True challenger to Samsung processing speeds. As for Apples the last iteration of the phone came with the simplest and most precise statement. It is a phone for the masses. It is simple and because of apples restrictions on UI modifications hard to damage it. But I have watched these same restrictions that help the phone user friendly make it an utter nightmare. Random deletion of files, incompatability with other bluetooth devise so as not to allow simple contact information transfers. The best statement about how fast an apple runs had this small caviat. They had fewer programs are running. I had to laugh at that…. the average “good” android runs multiple apps with similar marks. In my job I have to see positives and negatives of each phone which entails a lot of reading and trials whenever and wherever the opportunity arises. No one phone can be the greatest unless you look at it from a pure number of sales versus returns for each system. Then compare their individual variances